Conclusion: Challenges and Opportunities

In the airpower domain, NATO faces a looming challenge but one which is also a potential opportunity if understood and adequately planned for. Put simply, the US is gearing up to leave the rest of the Alliance behind in capability terms, as it has done in previous generational shifts, but this time with a different primary mission focus from other NATO member states. This is for two main reasons. First, that there is a growing awareness in the US Air Force and in other branches of the US military that even with its unmatched defence budget, the country cannot afford to continue trying to maintain a dominant military position over China and Russia in their own immediate neighbourhoods by pursuing incremental upgrades to existing capabilities. Long-range SAM systems, ever-improving radar and other sensor technologies and long-range anti-enabler missile systems are much cheaper for China in particular to produce than for the US to counter. Decades of airpower overmatch, which has become essential for the way NATO plans for operations, are being steadily eroded by rival powers and in terms of China, the picture will only get worse in the coming decades. China and Russia have studied the US dependence on tankers, big-wing ISR and tactical fighters in its conduct of warfare from the air and have found cost-effective ways to impose unacceptable risks to that family of capabilities. The second, and linked, reason for the US shift in capability is the new focus on China rather than Russia as the US military’s primary long-term peer threat. The demands of the Pacific theatre and the distances to which China as a potential air and maritime challenger can increasingly project (or create) contested and highly contested airspace call for new and different approaches to warfighting than has been the case in relation to Russia in